Here's how to boost your job search SEO

92% of companies use social media platforms to recruit candidates. Here's how improving your SEO can make you easily discoverable to hiring managers.

Jon Simmons

When Alfred Mosher Butts invented Scrabble in 1938, he assigned the letters S, E and O one point each. They paled in comparison to the powerful P and the mighty Q. Today, they are arguably the most important letters in the world.

SEO, or search engine optimization, is, in simple terms, the process of increasing a website’s visibility on a search engine’s results in order to drive traffic to that website.

Why SEO matters to your job search

Boosting the SEO of your blog, website and social media presence will allow recruiters and candidate-searching employers to more easily and quickly discover you; and while of course you should also be applying to jobs and networking within your industry, better SEO means a higher chance of naturally attracting interested visitors. Think of it like this: without optimizing your web pages and social media posts, you are like a street musician without an amp — occasionally someone will stop and listen. If you optimize, people will hear you from around the block. And who knows, maybe the CEO of Universal lives nearby.

Sound like something you might want to consider implementing in your online job search? You bet.

There’s a lot you can do to boost your SEO, and thankfully there are many resources to help you. Here are some basics you can start implementing right now.

Make great content

Creating compelling, original, sharable content is your biggest challenge and most important tool in boosting your SEO. Major search engines seek to deliver the best possible user experience, which means they rank sites with relevant information first. 92% of marketers say that content creation is effective for SEO. Align this strategy with your job search. Depending on your field, that could mean creating relevant blog posts, infographics, videos, photos or something else.

Establish a consistent pace

You just wrote an awesome article about the latest features of Adobe InDesign and what that means for graphic designers everywhere. You shared it on social media. Friends and family shared and retweeted your article. People loved it. Your future employer will be knocking on your door any second, right? Wrong.

Establishing a consistent voice will not only help establish you as an expert in your field, which is an attractive quality to potential employers, your content will also be more likely to be displayed on a search engine results page. Start by producing at least one quality piece of content a week and then try to increase that to a daily output.

Get the metadata right

Keywords matter because they help search engines identify content on your site, as well as the content in your social media posts, and increase their search ranking. Working keywords specific to your desired job or industry into page titles, metadescriptions, articles, tweets, and otherwise, ups your shot at getting discovered through Google. Just don’t overdo it. Hammering the same phrase into every update — “graphic designer” for example — will negatively affect rank results as well as dilute the authenticity of your content.

Adding links to your website or blog, as well as in your social media posts, also helps attract attention from search engines. There are thousands of articles on link strategy alone, but the most important thing to remember when it comes to your job search is to include both inbound and outbound links.

Also consider adding images and videos to your posts, tweets and updates. Not only are tweets shared more often when they have an image, but Facebook now favors displaying video in newsfeeds over anything else.

According to Adweek, 92% of companies use social media platforms to recruit candidates. This is great news for those who maintain an active presence on social networks, sharing new projects and asserting their voice into the digital conversation. By integrating SEO strategies into your job search, you will make it easier for hiring managers to find you.